TWIO-20: Are the government spying on you through your smartphones?

This is the twentieth episode of, ‘This Week In Organic’, the weekly show that debates the ramifications of the latest SEO and content marketing news.

In this episode, among other things we talk about whether the government are spying on you through your smartphones, whether you should publish your content as ‘accelerated mobile pages’ in the future and did you know that hacked SPAM could be seriously affecting your SEO?

Our host, David Bain is joined by Andrew Steel from Equator, Danny Ashton from Neomam and Justin Deaville from Receptional.

Here’s a summary of what we discussed:

Facebook are talking about launching a satellite to provide internet coverage in poorer countries. But is this a philanthropic exercise or are there other motives in mind?

Will a Facebook Satellite mean that the web becomes a walled garden in 3rd world countries?

What might this mean for businesses targeting these countries and people launching businesses in these countries?

TOPIC #2: Can the government spy on you through smartphones?

Edward Snowdon says that smartphones can be hacked into through a single text message and then be used to spy on their owners.

Should smartphone users be concerned?

Can the government spy on you through smartphones? Will consumers want to protect their data more carefully in the future? Will this impact ad personalisation?

TOPIC #3: Google ‘Customer Match’

Google Advertising is getting more personal with ‘Customer Match’. But will consumers like the personalised recommendations or are we stepping over to the creepy side of the line?

It will be possible to target the same person across different devices. But will it be all good for consumers?

TOPIC #4: Hacked SPAM

Did you know that hacked SPAM not only puts off users, it can also significantly impact your search rankings?

Google have announced a hacked SPAM algorithm update that has impacted around 5% of rankings – so fairly significant.

Would you say that SEOs are aware of the dangers of hacked SPAM?

If your website suffers from hacked SPAM, this may be impacting your organic search rankings. What can websites do to reduce the chance of being hacked and clean up any hacked content?

TOPIC #5 :Google’s ‘accelerated mobile pages’

Another update from Google and that’s the introduction of ‘accelerated mobile pages’ – but is this a real user experience improvement – or an attempt to defend against the walled gardens of Facebook and Apple?

Accelerated mobile pages load much faster. Should every business be publishing them in the future?

TOPIC #6: ‘Twitter Moments’

Twitter is introducing something it calls ‘Twitter Moments’, calling it the best of Twitter in an instant, offering users the chance to catch up with stories that matter to them.

But what will ‘Moments’ do for Twitter and for advertising on Twitter?

Will moments be what Twitter needs to significantly increase its revenue? Will this negatively impact user experience and use of Twitter?

Transcript:

DAVID BAIN: Are the government spying on you through your smartphones? Should you publish your content as accelerated mobile pages in the future? And did you know that hack spam could be seriously affecting your SEO? Welcome to This Week in Organic, Episode Number Twenty.

Hello and welcome. I’m David Bain, and each week I’ll be joined by some knowledgeable opinionated folks to discuss the latest happenings in anything that impacts organic traffic. And as for you, dear viewer, get involved. To click on the tell a little bird button at your top left hand side, so that’s up there, to share the show with your friends, and then tell us what you think in the comments section as well, so just over there. That would be great to hear from you. So I’ll try to read out as many comments as I can.

But let’s find out more about today’s guests – where they’re from, and what’s caught their attention this week. So starting off with Justin.

DANNY ASHTON: So yeah, my name is Danny Ashton. I’m the founder and CEO of NeoMam Studios. We are an influencer marketing agency, and we’re based in Manchester. And if you want to check out our stuff it’s at www.neomam.com.

DAVID BAIN: An influencer marketing agency, I like that description. I might have to dig into that a bit more. And last but not least, we have Andrew.

ANDREW STEEL: Hey guys. I’m Andrew Steel. I’m the head of SEO at Equator. We are – this is going to sound even crazier – and ideas agency. So basically what we do is deliver integrated marketing design and development solutions for clients’ operating and increasing a more connected world. And you can find us at www.eqtr.com.

Andrew Steel: “Faster loading content can only be a good thing.”

DAVID BAIN: That’s wonderful, thanks Andrew. By the way, your volume seems just a little bit lower than the other couple, so you possibly either hold your microphone closer, or maybe your computer settings turn it up. That’d be wonderful.

But moving on to our first topic. So that’s Facebook are talking about launching a satellite to provide internet coverage in poorer countries. But what I’m wondering is if this is a philanthropic exercise, or are there other motives involved? So who should we talk to first about this one? Justin, are Facebook all about philanthropy here?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Oh yes, of course they are, David. Of course. No, I mean of course there’s a business motive behind providing broadband. And I think Facebook, and also Google, are doing very similar things around the world, aren’t they? I mean they’re such enormous companies now that it’s really important for them that everyone should be on broadband. And as they reach the limit of people who are kind of internet enabled in Western advanced economies, they need to spread broadband further around the world so that they can increase the size of the audience because they’re up against that limit.

So with Facebook, I mean of course by installing broadband in other countries that don’t already have it, it’s going to try and buy a market in its own favour.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: I think, though, long-term that they become unstuck if that becomes too biased. You can tilt the playing field a little bit in your favour, but if they’re going to try and block out any other big tech companies, then I think they’ll undermine their own position.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, tilting the playing field is a good description. That’s what I would describe Windows 10 as possibly doing as well, and a lot of big companies try and tilt a little bit. But Danny, do you think this is tilting too much, or has Facebook got a really good proposition in mind by providing internet to countries that don’t really have decent broadband at the moment?

DANNY ASHTON: Well it’s interesting, because I remember this week I came across an article which was a survey about especially people in Asia, about did they use the internet, and a lot of them said that they didn’t use the internet, which is interesting. But when they actually looked down upon it, they were using Facebook, and actually, you know, these Facebook users didn’t actually see that as the internet. So it’s actually that Facebook is their own kind of different channel to what they define as going on the web, and using it how we used to use it back in the day.

Yeah, I mean to be honest, I think a lot of this stuff around the satellites, there’s another thing with Google, I think they had an idea. I think potentially it’s just kind of a PR thing. I really can’t imagine it paying for itself, but I don’t know. We’ll have to see it when it happens, really. Maybe I’m being too cynical.

DAVID BAIN: That’s interesting. And it certainly is good PR. It got to the first page of most newspapers I would imagine, so that works. But do Facebook need more PR? Andrew, can you see this being a great move by Facebook, or do you think other businesses competing online that perhaps don’t necessarily want to deal with Facebook should be concerned about Facebook having a bit of a monopoly situation in the future?

ANDREW STEEL: I think it’s definitely an interesting one. I think, you know, looking purely at the kind of audience it opens them up to, I’ve seen something within the last couple of weeks about the kind of figures for the African user base for Facebook. I think three months or so maybe that they’ve had their offices in South Africa, and they’re talking about 125 million active users already within Africa, 95% of which, I think, are using mobile to access it.

So in terms of being able to make Facebook more accessible within a large market like that, yeah, it makes sense because ultimately for Facebook to be able to monetise itself it’s all about continuing to grow its audience because you can sell advertising more when you can advertise to more people, in the simplest sense of things. So I can see why they might want to do it.

In terms of how successful it will be, or whether it’s just a bit of a marketing stunt there, you know, as Danny was saying, it’s hard to tell right now, but it would be quite a lot to invest, I guess, in a marketing stunt with what they’re talking about doing. Whether it’ll put people off by kind of walling out anyone else, I don’t know, or certainly I’ve not seen enough detail of how they plan to implement it, or even anything about what the costs associated with being able to access it would be. But in the simplest sense, I can see why they might want to do it as that kind of continuant of trying to break new ground, and open new audiences who can use Facebook, and again continue to push how much Facebook are able to monetise their platform, and the content that exists on it.

DAVID BAIN: So Danny, Andrew talked about Facebook potentially walling out other businesses. I remember kind of getting started online really in the late 90s, and actually AOL having quite a presence then. And they created a bit of a wall situation, and tried to create the internet within their boundaries. Do you think that the internet escaped from that, and became very democratic? And then is perhaps in danger of becoming more of a walled situation again in the future?

DANNY ASHTON: Well, yeah. I think there are plenty of companies that have gone through that process of trying to control it. But I think time and time again, as probably when we look at the second story with Snowden, you know the users of the internet are always going to find a new way of getting access to things that they can’t get access to. So I think, you know, a walled garden approach is going to be expected, but I think in most cases they generally fail. So if you look at the AOL example, where is that now? You know, they’re now as open as anyone else, and their business isn’t what it was.

I think what’s interesting, especially in Africa, is the use of kind of mobile payments. So I know that’s a major problem over there because they don’t have the banking system like we do over here, that actually Bitcoin, and making payments through mobile devices is really helping with businesses over there. So I think there will be secondary benefits of bringing more access over there. So I don’t think it’s a bad thing. If this means that Facebook’s going to allow lots of people who couldn’t normally afford to access the internet, in a hope of building a walled garden, but I would probably argue that in most cases that would be a failed attempt.

DAVID BAIN: Okay, Stephanie in the chat is saying that Facebook’s still relatively young, and all profits are a driver. Pioneering service has always been the first passion. So I mean it certainly comes across that way some of the time the way that Mark Zuckerberg talks. And hopefully that’s going to be the situation. But it’s interesting that you both think that while there may be a slight concern, there’s probably enough competition out there online that if Facebook did go down too much of a walled garden approach, then there will be an opportunity for other competitors to come in there, so it’s probably nothing to be overly concerned about.

So I think Danny, yeah you mentioned the second topic there, so it’s probably a good time to move onto that. So that’s Edward Snowden said that smartphones can be hacked into by just a single text message, and then used to spy on their owners. So could smartphone users be sabotaged? Should they be concerned about this? Danny, what are your thoughts on this one?

DANNY ASHTON: Well, I’ve got to be careful, haven’t I? Because the government’s probably listening to our conversation right now. But I mean, I’m a big advocate, supporter of Snowden. I think he did a very brave thing in what he did. And after all the reading, reading his book about it, obviously the Guardian articles, and everything else, I think the big shot was how much the American and UK governments were looking in. And the fact that they’re just able to listen in on our text messages is mad, but probably something that we all expected, but we just wouldn’t know we’d ever find out. Because you can imagine that if you come across this malware of people hacking, creating kind of hacks on websites, a government funded program is going to be able to do pretty much anything.

So yeah, I think, hopefully, you know, his kind of release says he’s going to put more light on the situation. And I still think again, what we talked about before, technology is always going to be moving forward, and the internet user is always going to be able to find ways around it. So I know there’s lots of technology. There’s like the black phone, there’s encryption, and all those kind of stuff that people can do. But I just hope that it becomes a little bit more, you know, us as voters in the countries, that we can decide whether we feel that spying on people’s mobile phones is something that we want to do.

DAVID BAIN: Absolutely. So Andrew, do you feel that the average user will get more concerned about privacy concerns on their mobile phone, or do you think that the average person out there just isn’t going to worry about that as long as their phone works okay?

ANDREW STEEL: To be honest, I kind of think the average user’s probably going to, you know, after the story passes, it’ll probably go entirely from mind. And I think with a lot of these things, and I think Snowden has come out and said this himself, that for a lot of these things, the cases that it’s being used in largely are for criminal activity or terrorist activity, or anything like that. And I think it’s always that kind of trade up over how much information you want the government, or governments in general, to be accessing to ensure a perceived level of security, or a perceived level of activity taking place to ensure that security over horrible events happening, or anything like that.

So I think for most people it’s probably just going to pass as a yeah, it’s something that becomes a talking point. And again around elections and things like that it becomes a talking point for these kinds of activities. But for the majority of people, I can see it being the kind of the thing that will pass by fairly quickly from mind, and people will continue to use their mobile devices in the way that most people do. And you know, what you can do on mobile devices will continue to expand as well. I think it’s kind of expected that governments need to be looking at information to level they are, but at the same time people don’t like the idea that they’re being spied on themselves, but they’re fine with anyone else being spied on as long as the offshoot of that is that they feel more secure, and in a safer environment.

DAVID BAIN: Yes, some great points there. We’ve got Justin re-joined us there. So that’s great. So you can hear us loud and clear, Justin?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: I can, absolutely, yes. I’m sorry I went away for a little while there, but I’m back again now.

DAVID BAIN: Okay. I get the feeling that your microphone that Blab is picking up isn’t the one that you’re wearing on your head. But I’ll leave you to ponder over that for maybe just a second or two, and just talk to Danny a little bit more about smartphone usage, and also the fact that advertisers are wanting to get a little bit more targeted in terms of who they’re talking to. Do you think these privacy concerns potentially could put off consumers from wanting to receive very personalised adverts in the next couple of years, Danny?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah, I think definitely. I think the whole issue of ad blockers is becoming more and more important at the moment. I know there’s news that the main ad blocker software that was used was recently bought by a mystery buyer, which I don’t know. There’s kind of all sorts of ideas that that was maybe a government entity, or something like that. But I don’t want to go down that path. But I think most consumers don’t want to be advertised in the normal way. I think that’s pretty much kind of all of us could probably agree with that. Regardless of how much targeting that people say that if it’s targeted correctly, then it all works. I think most people don’t want to be interrupted. These people who are on Facebook want to enjoy Facebook; they want to be entertained by what their friends are doing, and they don’t really go on there to be sold to. Which is always a challenge, because that is why Facebook and these websites exist.

So I personally think that the kind of advertising model in the way that it has been done on the internet has a limited shelf life as internet consumers become more savvy to technology, because technology can completely block ads from serving you, from tracking you. And it used to be a very small number of people, but now it is becoming such a problem that actually the advertisers themselves are discussing it, the publishers. It’s becoming an issue.

And I think it’s a good issue. And I only say that, obviously creating content marketing it’s not advertisement, so there’s an incentive for me there. But just as a normal internet user, I’d be happy if I never seen another banner ad or popup ever again. But maybe people might disagree if you sell banner ads, so I don’t know.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, I was going to say, Danny, what does your agency do again? But it’s interesting though, the point you made. Does this mean that SEO will become more of a popular word, or at least a word that isn’t associated so much with ‘grey hatted-ness’ moving forward, and it’ll actually be the correct and right thing to do to be part of a marketing department moving forward? Because there was a spell for a couple of years, maybe say three or four years back, that everyone was saying SEO is really going to die off. It’s not going to happen at all.

DANNY ASHTON: Yep. No, I think it’s true, and I think that there has been a major shift. I was talking about this with someone the other day, and there was that period between when manipulous practices used to work, and so you could run SEO at a 90% margin business, where you only had to outsource some of that link building, and it would work. And then there was that kind of transition period from there to about now, I would say, where it isn’t now a dirty word, and it is something that we can talk about, and actually say we do help with SEO, and SEO is a metric and a goal that we want to support because the algorithm has finally caught up.

And I’m not saying that I didn’t involve in that. I was certainly in my affiliate days. But I think it’s just, as any industry, it grows, it changes. And during those transition periods, people are going to remove it from their name, don’t want to talk about it. I certainly did; I was on the bandwagon like anyone else. I didn’t use the word links, or anything like that because you would be tied with the same brush. So you doing your white hat based promotion versus someone just doing link wheels, forum spam, the rest of it, it was all seen as the same thing. And I think it was natural that a lot of people within the industry had to kind of step away from that, and that was the way was to just not talk about it.

DAVID BAIN: We’ve got Andy saying in the chat that Google knows more than the governments anyway about what you do online, but most people still use Google. And I’ve also got Stephanie saying that we had the technology to actively listen to cell phone conversation back in 2007. And she wrote it was too creepy back then, but now they’re deploying it so it seems to be fairly commonplace now. Justin, do you think that it’s just a case of the line, in terms of what’s acceptable, seems to move all the time? And something that consumers may think is unacceptable now, maybe in two years’ time will be acceptable, and that’s just the way progress is made?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Yes, I think that’s right. The consumers are often very wary of new technology and changes. And as an example, I think the reason why Google have been looking, because Google’s trying to build a self-driving car. And the biggest obstacle to that seems to be people’s inhibitions about getting in a car where they don’t feel in control. And so Google apparently have been looking back at the history of other technological development, and they looked at the development of the lift – or the elevator in the US. And of course when elevators were built, they were these scary things within a building that could easily collapse, and so people were wary about going in them. So you always used to have – and you see it in the old films, don’t you? – you always used to have an elevator attendant. Someone who would also be in the lift with you to make you feel safe. And it wasn’t until, according to the myth that I heard, the 1960s that there was a strike of elevator attendants, and people realised well actually you could just go in a lift, and press the buttons yourself, and then they got used to that technology.

And I think it’s exactly the same thing with the online technologies that we’re seeing now, whether that’s the software about the self-driving car, or ad blocking software. In the end, there seems to be a convergence between the old fashioned principles of independent journalism and advertising used to be very separate, and there’s a convergence nowadays so that those things are coming closer together. And we see editorial content that isn’t written by journalists, and therefore can have a bias towards a particular brand. And we accept that as consumers if we’re interested in that brand or that content.

DAVID BAIN: Okay, there were a few different points I was thinking while you were actually saying that. But in relation to that, obviously you’ve got Google Customer Match launching as well, which is getting very personalised as well in terms of advertising. And I was thinking about what Danny said, and that you focus on content marketing. But is something like Google Customer Match, Danny, now a really great opportunity to drive people back to content, and do you not want to actually integrate paid advertising with content marketing as well?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s always going to be a transition period as we move forward. But yeah, in the short term there’s no reason why using those campaigns where you’re able to actually pick up from people who’ve consumed your content, and bring them back. But I think that, you know, the future is going to be kind of less interruption based, and your content yourself has to kind of sell the brand, I suppose.

But yeah, I think like anything, it’ll depend how we use it as an industry, and hopefully it doesn’t get overused, and all the rest of it. So yeah.

DAVID BAIN: Exactly. I mean Andy’s saying in the chat Google Match is going to be awesome when it’s rolled out if done correctly, and not abused. But you can just imagine people abusing it, and just going a little bit too far in terms of personalising, and just creeping.

DANNY ASHTON: Getting stalkerish, yeah, definitely.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, exactly. Andrew, do you have any concerns about that? Have you looked into what Google Match might be able to provide? And also with paid search in general, do you actually try to use that to assist with SEO efforts as well?

ANDREW STEEL: Yeah, absolutely. You know, as I was saying at the start for ourselves, we work in a very integrated way, and try not to look at things for clients in terms of channels, but more what they’re trying to deliver, and the approaches that are best to do that. So I think with things like Customer Match, I think exactly as Andy was saying in the chat there, it can be a great thing, and a really powerful thing. I think the thing that’s important to bear in mind with any of these kinds of advances is that it has to be creating value for your users, or your audience that you’re trying to target, rather than just a race to the bottom of just spamming people. And effectively, you know, there will be undoubtedly people who will use these kind of things like Customer Match to just spam email lists of people with targeting. And you know, they’ll serve them up irrelevant things, and they’ll get a very low engagement rate with them.

But where things like Customer Match have the potential to be very valuable is if you’re using it in a sensible way, and only really kind of putting things in front of a very focused and segmented audience that you know more than just their email about – that you think what you’re going to be offering them or presenting to them is going to be of value for them, and that they’ll convert. And whether that’s sharing content with them that you think the conversion metric might be the engagement with it, or whether they share it, or you know, just the fact that they read it, and consume the message. Or whether it’s sending them offers about things for like a hotel room, or a table book in a restaurant, or a product, or anything like that, it ultimately comes down to using these things smart. And you know, some people won’t and some people will. And the people who will, they’ll continue to be fine, and their users will be fine with getting them. But it’s the same way that the telephone can be used to spam people with all dialler phone calls, but it’s always nice when you get a nice call from a company that are genuinely offering something of use or value to you. I think it’s as simple as that really in my eyes.

DAVID BAIN: Absolutely, that’s a great point that spam was around before the internet. It didn’t just happen as soon as technology happened. So I mean, Justin, we’ve got Facebook retargeting at the moment, and that’s very effective. And it’s nice to have an alternative to that, I suppose. Does Receptional, your agency, offer consultancy services with regards to Facebook retargeting, and if so, might you actually look to do the same with this new service by Google as well?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Yes, we do. It is one of the things that we do. And in fact I had a client in this morning who I was talking to about that feature coming live, and the ways that we might use it. And I think, as Andrew said, any technology can be used both for good and for evil, to put it in binary terms. And for responsible brands, then you’re going to be able to use that Google retargeting in an effective and helpful way.

You know, and there are lots of other services that Google has introduced. For example, I leave for a meeting in the morning, and Google pings me, and tells me I need to go and get my train, otherwise I’m going to miss my meeting. You know, and that’s now a useful service that I rely upon, which is unpaid. But you know, it might be the case that a customer buys a product from you, and usually you buy another product a month later, and we can use that remarketing system just to let the customer know that they’ll likely need to reorder, and they might find that that was a helpful thing to be doing.

And again, that’s the convergence between useful content and advertising. So yeah, it’s certainly something that we’ll be investigating, and trying with our clients. I saw, there was a post I think on WordStream’s blog, and they described this as the most important advance in ad words ever. And I thought well, let’s calm down a little bit. I think it’ll be useful in some ways, you know, in the same way as remarketing. We use that with most of our clients, but it adds another 10% onto the business; it doesn’t revolutionise what’s already happening.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, no, but I love the opportunity to be more integrated in terms of marketing approach, and the fact that it can assist content marketing, and it’s not just about driving people to one action, and if that action doesn’t happen then you’ve lost them forever. It’s nice to be a little bit cleverer, certainly.

DAVID BAIN: Absolutely. Yeah, another keyword. Well, coming up we’re going to talking about hacked spam, accelerated mobile pages, and Twitter moments. But first of all if you’re enjoying the talk here, that would be great if you could tell a little bird. You know, click on the tell a little bird button, and share the discussion with some people. We’ve had some great comments so far as well, so if you’d like to add your opinion there, we’ll read it out, and it’d be great to have the interaction as well.

But moving on to the next topic, which is did you know that hacked spam not only puts off users, it can also significantly impact your search rankings? Because of course Google have announced a hacked spam algorithm update. It’s impacted around 5% of rankings, so fairly significant really. So Andrew, would you say that most SEOs are actually aware of the dangers from an SEO perspective of hacked spam?

ANDREW STEEL: Yeah, I’d like to think that most of them are. I know certainly there’s a statistic flying about, I think it’s maybe a couple of years old now, and certainly in the early days of manual actions, that hacked spam manual actions were the second most common effectual notification that people got of a manual action, presumably after link spam basically. It’s certainly something that we’ve seen across a variety of verticals that has been a problem, and it’s definitely something that Google have put a lot of focus on. And the results are ultimately cleaner now as a result of the actions they’ve been taking in this area than they had been in the past.

But yeah, I would definitely say that most SEOs would be aware of that, and also the importance of that, because it’s something that people were using to manipulate results, and ultimately it’s not good for Google in long term because the experience of Google for anyone using it is the quality of the results that they get there. And obviously security in general online has become an increasing area of focus for people over the last couple of years, definitely, but probably since people have been online as well. And it’s something that Google need to be taking action on, and seem to be taking action on as well to ensure that kind of continued safety for people using not just Google, but anything that they find through Google as well. Because people will naturally, you know, if they end up losing their details to a hack site or anything like that then they’re naturally going to be wondering why they found that in Google in the first place. Certainly people are less savvy and familiar with how Google works, and how they kind of police the web, if you like.

So I would say yeah, I think most SEOs would be aware of that, and I’d hope most would be having at least a simple level of monitoring, even if it’s just looking at Search Console, or Webmaster Tools as it’s used to be noted, to make sure that they’re keeping an eye on any of the kind of alerts that come through on that. But also working with kind of web teams and hosting teams to be keeping an eye more widely on what’s going on, and the activity on the kind of back end of a website.

DAVID BAIN: So would you say that webmasters need to be more concerned about potential hacking now than a couple of years ago, say?

ANDREW STEEL: I don’t know that they need to be more concerned now, but I think the ways of hacking sites, obviously continue to become more and more sophisticated. And if you go along to any of the kind of conferences for even the sort of open source TMS providers will always be kind of talking, and keeping their user base informed of any kind of security breaches that they find with their services, and updating that.

And in general, actually, that seems to have become a lot more common practice for businesses. And in general you see quite regularly stories going up about security breaches online for sites, or for services that take place online. So I think it’s just something that webmasters should always be mindful of, and no more so now, I guess, than any time before. But it’s certainly good to see Google are taking more action in this area, and I think they’re beta testing as well how they deal with the kind of manual actions for hacked sites, so that it makes it a bit easier for smaller businesses or smaller site owners who are maybe less technically minded to be able to deal with these things. Because they’re talking about, I think, automatically rolling back manual actions for hacked sites if they find that the symptoms of what they’ve identified to generate that manual action in the first place has been corrected.

I guess to take it back to the question that you specifically asked, no I don’t think that there’s any more or less reason now to be concerned about this than there had been before. It’s just generally something that I think is good practice to keep on top of, and be observant about.

DAVID BAIN: So I’m kind of sticking with Andrew on this one, because I think it would be fair to describe him as probably the hardest core SEO as part of this discussion. So just in relation to this, if a webmaster does discover that they have been hacked, and they’ve got some pages on their site that they certainly didn’t put up, and it’s obviously some spammer that’s put them up, what are the next steps after that? What software maybe should they use, and are there a few general simple steps that they need to take to try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

ANDREW STEEL: I think it really depends. You know, each site will be different in the setup, and everyone will have their own different tools. I know that internally for us we work, across not just the SEO team, also our development and hosting teams, to keep an eye on these things as well. So we’re working to look at things like server logs, and all these kind of things in terms of being able to identify these kinds of issues, and deal with them. You know, if you’re finding content that’s gone up that you know you haven’t created, then at the very least from an SEO perspective, you would want to be conducting a full crawl of the site to see what all the pages are, and kind of looking for any of the patterns to the ones that you know you haven’t created yourself.

So again, if it was going up in a blog, as is fairly common for where these pages go, then you would want to be looking at your own kind of publication calendar, and then you could use that to quite quickly filter through any pages that are going up that you know you haven’t had a hand in, and be looking to remove those certainly. But then in terms of the security breaches that have allowed someone to get into your site, I guess at a simple level, if it’s a blog you’re going to want to change your login details and things like that, but also check for the latest, kind of any plugins that you’re using, updates to those, in case there are security breaches through those. And you know, to be honest, there are plenty of things at a more technical level that go way beyond my capabilities, and that’s one of the reasons why we work across a variety of teams here at Equator to do all these kinds of things. But those are a good starter for ten, I guess, if you think you’ve experienced these kind of issues.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, some great tips there. Thanks. So Danny, it looks like you’re going to have to find another way to publish all this content then. So yeah, are you concerned, Danny, maybe from a content perspective of appearing on sites that perhaps have been hacked, and may even reduce the perceived quality of what you publish in other sites? Or is it not generally something that you consider in the areas that you’re involved in?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah, I mean I think it’s always a worry isn’t it? When you produce content, and it gets shared. You know, and always the thing we say to clients is look, we can’t control who’s going to pick it up, and run with it. But I think that Google’s a lot cleverer than we give it credit for, or probably many of us in the room already do give it credit. But you know, the difference between something being shared virally, going wide, and everyone covering it from maybe 70 different countries, to a SEO campaign, where there’s an obvious manipulative action, and you’re kind of placing links on certain sites, the way it looks in every kind of variable is so obvious.

So I think there’s always going to be a bit of crap. There’s going to be scrapers always, especially when you get content featured on big sites scrapers are going to pick it up. And Google has to account for that. The world is not a perfect place, neither is the internet. So there’s always going to be a bit of murkiness going on.

But I think from kind of the whole hack point of view, you know I’m certainly not a technical guy, and probably why the question wasn’t deemed at me, but I’ve certainly had issues, even with content working for a long time, especially with clients who use WordPress. I think WordPress is one of the biggest riskiest things that they can use because that’s the main kind of key focus for people getting into a lot of these sites. It’s one of the reasons why when rebuilt our site we built it in just in plain HTML, because I was like well, my main thing is I don’t want someone hacking it, because it’s just something that no one likes to deal with, whether it’s an agency or a client.

So I do think there’s probably going to be response to this kind of increase in hacking as people move into different ways of kind of hosting their content. If they don’t require the database capabilities of some kind of very popular CMS systems, which are notoriously bad because people don’t update them, and people don’t look after them, and all the rest of the reasons, but yeah.

DAVID BAIN: Danny, do you think it’s fair to say that WordPress is notorious for actually getting hacked into, or is it just simply the fact that people don’t update it enough?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah, well I think it’s just because it’s popular. And I think the challenge is obviously everyone—it’s always, whenever I’ve had sites hacked of my own, it’s usually the plugins I’ve installed. And so people get plugin crazy, and then you forget which plugins you’ve got, and it’s usually there the open doors.

There is a site, and it’s a paid service, so take that with a grain of salt, but as a non-technical guy, I use it all the time, which is Sucuri. They have a service where you sign up for a year, they watch your site, and if it has a problem, they fix it. And I’m not on an affiliate link, I promise, they just are excellent. So if you don’t have a team of developers, and you don’t have someone, and you just want to not worry about it, get their £150 yearly package or something because it’s well worth it.

DAVID BAIN: I see Andy saying in the comments webmasters should always worry about hackings, but not just from an SEO perspective, but also from a brand reputation perspective. Justin, have you worked with any clients who have actually been hacked, and perhaps actually seen a bit of a fallen brand reputation because of it? And perhaps you’ve had to do some work to have to recover this.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Yes, I can tell you about people that I’ve worked with whose sites have been hacked, but I can probably go one better, and I probably shouldn’t admit this in public. But we have a WordPress site at Receptional as an agency, and last year our site was hacked as well. And so I agree about the comments about how popular WordPress is. And if I was a hacker trying to break into a website, then WordPress would be the one I would choose because there are just so many different WordPress websites, and I can write a crawler that goes around, and finds them all, and then breaks in.

And the reason that our site was hacked was because of an extension that we’d had on the site, and there was a known vulnerability, and the developer who had written it hadn’t then informed everybody about this vulnerability, so lots of the sites that had been using this extension had then been hacked, which is not fantastic. And so since then we’re rebuilding our site with our own theme, and we’re using a minimal number of extensions, which is advice we’ve already have.

I’d also say that in terms of security for a WordPress site, because they’re so vulnerable, I would be saying that we now have a double layer of authentication. So we have passwords both on WordPress and on the server, so you can’t access one without accessing the other. And also, with WordPress, I would be suggesting changing the URL at which you login in at. Because lots of WordPress sites are setup, and they have a standard login page, and of course you can send a crawler out, and look for that page, and know where to expect it, and then it’s easy to try and break into the site. So you can try a different URL setup.

And all of those things together made our site much more secure since it was attacked last year. And of course from an agency point of view, the brand reputation, you know, that you were asking about at the beginning, it’s not a good place to be.

DAVID BAIN: Absolutely, yeah. Also Sam Taurus saying in the chat, ‘I second the support for security. WP engine has a host that partners with them too. Highly recommended.’ Andy Halliday saying, ‘I prefer Word Fence to security, but they’re both great plugins for securing a site.’ So I guess the message is maybe pay a little bit more for your hosting, go for a WordPress specialist, and that only perhaps even allows certain plugins there as well because they know WordPress, they know the potential weak points as well. And if you do that, you’re going to be better than ninety odd percent of other websites out there. So you’re not going to be a weak link within the WordPress marketplace, so hopefully you’re going to reduce your likelihood of that happening.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Absolutely.

DAVID BAIN: Okay, well moving on to the next topic, which is another update from Google, and that’s the introduction of accelerated mobile pages. But is this a real user experience improvement, or an attempt to defend against the walled gardens of Facebook and Apple? So these accelerated mobile pages, Justin, maybe staying with you, do you think they potentially could offer a highly enlightened, enhanced experience for users? Or is this more of a marketing opportunity for Google to try and actually position themselves in the same place as Apple and Facebook?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: I imagine it’s a bit of both. We talked earlier about trying to tilt the playing field in your favour, didn’t we? And this is, you know, this is something Google’s going to be trying to do. And it seems to me whether it’s this initiative or something else, is that we’re all carrying around mobile phones. Now the majority of searches are made on mobile phones, and so it seems to me that something about them will have to speed up that experience of using mobile phones to access the internet.

And it seems to me that this is an interesting starting point. My understanding is that the pages are really stripped back and bare, so that you really only have HTML pages, so it’s a bit like going back ten years in terms of the sort of bare layout of a page. You can’t then have any of the JavaScript on the page that we’ve all become used to. It is a text based experience that you’re like to be getting.

And so from a marketer’s point of view, I was kind of horrified at the thought of not being able to access my Google Analytics, and see what was going on on a site. But from a mobile site then absolutely, it does make sense. If I’m using a mobile phone, I want an instant experience. I think it’s really at the beginning though, isn’t it? It’s difficult to say at this point as to kind of how successful it’s likely to be, but whether it’s this or something else, then I think Google is pushing very hard to speed up the mobile experience, and they’ve got a lot of high profile publishers involved in this project. So the list that I was looking at was the BBC, the FT, the New York Times, Hearst Publications were all involved in this project. And as it happens I think they’ve got the right people behind them, and it’ll certainly be interesting to see where it gets to.

DAVID BAIN: Absolutely, yeah. What you were saying there also made me think about the fact that the file sizes of webpages have increased so much over the last few years. A few years ago it was recommended not to have webpages more than about 100K, and now you see many webpages are more than a meg as well. And you’ve got web designers that just don’t care, or don’t even know that their big bloated PNGs are seriously going to affect the user experience. So I suppose it’s a way to deal with that, and that’s the challenge with the responsive design as well, because quite often with a responsive design, the whole source code has to load before actually, whichever browser it is, is aware that it’s actually only a set width, and only certain elements within the design that should be loaded.

Andrew, do you think these new accelerated mobile pages should actually be a good thing for SEO, a good thing for user experience, or do you think SEOs may be concerned about how this is actually going to impact rankings, for instance, in the future?

ANDREW STEEL: I think it’s a good question. I think, in general, as Justin was saying there as well, Google are very focused at the moment on the mobile experience for people, and faster loading content can only be a good a thing, I suppose, for SEO. If you think again back to what we were talking about before of ultimately the aim of anything should be to provide the best possible user experience. You know, if you’re trying to sell anything, or serve content, or anything like that. So faster pages are definitely in line with that.

I think there’s probably a fair few considerations that need to be made from SEO, certainly in terms of if you’re running these kind of pages alongside a fuller version of your site, then things like canonical tagging, or all the kind of usual things that you need to be mindful of in terms of duplication of content will come into it. But I know that we work very closely with our developers and designers in general for things like responsive design, which is one of the things as an agency we’ve actually been quite famous for, to ensure that the way things load that we’re using sensible in lining where possible, and the execution of files as well to try to speed things up. And page speed in general has been a big focus area across those teams, certainly over this year because of the focus on mobile that’s increasing there as well.

So I think seeing Google coming up with these AMP pages, and Facebook just before that launching their instant articles, it’s no surprise really. But I think the interesting thing again to be mindful of what Google are doing with the AMP pages is that it still loads ads, and at the end of the day that’s a good thing for Google because they’re focused on mobile, and they make money from advertising. So it’s no surprise to see that advertising will still be a feature in there. But you know, as Justin said, I think beyond that it’s quite stripped down, and it’s to the point content. And the type of content that people are probably going to consume from this is going to be quite simplified. So there are probably some considerations, perhaps not specifically SEO, but more general marketing ones of what are you including on these pages given the stripped down, kind of less designed type elements? There’s potentially a much higher focus on the quality of copy, and how you’re able to describe and sell your product and service if it’s that type of page. Or make your content engaging because it’s going to load quicker, so people are either going to get to the point quicker, or they’re going to get bored and leave. So those kinds of considerations as well I think need to be factored in along with the general SEO considerations around managing potential duplication of content and that. But generally, you know, I’m all for it. I think it’s a good thing to be able to make content move faster for people. You know, as a mobile user and consumer of content myself, it’s ideal.

DAVID BAIN: So how do you actually track what’s happening on these pages if you can’t have JavaScript in there then?

ANDREW STEEL: My understanding is that they’re working already on a way around being able to get analytics in there, but it might be a kind of simplified down version of that because it wouldn’t make sense for Google, as a provider of this, to then create a way of delivering pages that you can’t track anything in. But I think we all probably have to be prepared for a much more simplified experience of that. So whether go tracking and things like that are going to be possible, potentially not. But my understanding was that it’s a much more simplified version of JavaScript that can operate. I can only assume that they’re going to be working to that. But personally, I don’t know enough of the detail around that yet, but I can’t see why Google would ever get to a point of allowing this to be produced in serve ads, but not actually be able to track what’s going on with them. Because ultimately I don’t think you can really sell advertising, and not have people be able to make informed decisions about what that advertising is doing in this format.

DAVID BAIN: Also Andrew, in relation to the previous question actually, Sam said would you guys recommend adding an SSL to help with these challenges with spam? Now, I mean obviously from an SEO perspective, you’ve got to make the call on SSL with a big picture in mind. It can be challenging changing your URLs, but simply from a spam perspective, can SSL help with that?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: It’s security really at the end of the day, isn’t it? I think if you can add it, and you can add it in a way that’s going to be completely healthy from an SEO perspective then yeah, I’m all for it. And I think in general a lot of the web’s clearly going that way. Google, you know there have been the stories, I think it was last year or the start of this year, about Google’s kind of looking around that in terms of potentially even making it a positive ranking signal to have SSL sites, and penalising non-SSL sites was something else that was talked about as well. So security’s always a focus there. I think if you can then it’s great, but you know, as you say, David, it’s not something that we would ever approach lightly, as a, you know, if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, that you can just go on, and stick an SSL certificate on your site.

And you know, there’s not a lot of work that goes on around there to ensure that you’re not going to lose out on traffic, or rankings, or anything like that. Because you know, implementing SSL, even at small levels, for small sites still has definite work that needs to take place in terms of, again, redirecting, and redirect mapping across the site, and making sure that you are serving up one version ultimately, or making it clear to Google and all search engines what your preferred version of your pages is. So there’s definitely a lot of considerations that need to be made for that. Whether you’re planning to implement a certificate just partially on your site, or site wide, there’s definitely a lot of work and consideration that needs to go in planning that to make sure you don’t ultimately damage the performance of your site long term.

DAVID BAIN: And Danny, you’ve certainly focused a lot on image led content marketing in the past. Would you be concerned that Google are perhaps encouraging websites to publish just in text, and how do you think, if in any way, it might impact your marketing activities?

DANNY ASHTON: Well from what I’ve read about it, it does seem to be they want to not give it just as a pure HTML. It’s going to utilise some of the other technologies like video and imagery as a part of that, within that framework. And we’ve been actually playing around with, you know, one of the problems with the static infographic format, it’s one image, depending on how a site’s set up it’s quite hard to responsive. So we’ve been creating responsive versions of that, so developing within HTML frameworks that are relatively simple, that allow people who are on different browser types, mobile, tablet, what have you, to then view that experience.

And I think that’s similar to what kind of Google’s attempting with it. I mean, it still comes back to their core idea, which is it’s their fight against ad blocking. You know, people are complaining. And then there was a study, and I’ll try to share it in the comments, which was analysing big publisher websites with ad blocker on and ad blocker off. And the difference was massive in the amount of load times. And that is something that is going to become more and more of an issue, and that’s a good thing. I think things have become a bit bloated in regards to kind of tracking, and I think anything that we can do to cut that down, and improve the experience that people have is only a good thing.

And as content marketers, we need to always be looking at this next level technology. Again, I’m not a technical guy, but I know when we built our agency site, we used SVG technology for the images because we wanted to keep the load time of the entire site really, really fast. So we’re quite proud of using that latest technology to make sure that if things can be done in a way, it’s just a little bit more thinking time that goes into a bit more development to make sure that it works. And certainly if you’re willing to hang around for the long term, then it’s worth it really.

DAVID BAIN: I’m just looking up online to see what SVGs are actually, because I was aware of image sprites, certainly. Is that similar to that?

DANNY ASHTON: You’ll have to ask the developer. All he told me is SVGs. I’m always interested in where technology is moving, and I think it’s a way of showing imagery on the site that’s in a slightly quicker way, but I don’t know. Anyone who knows more about it?

DAVID BAIN: Apparently it’s an image format for vector graphics. It basically means scalable graphics, so when you increase in size, you’re not going to lose any quality at all.

DAVID BAIN: Okay, yeah. Well moving on to the last topic, and that’s Twitter’s introducing something called Twitter Moments, calling it the best of Twitter in an instant. Offering users a chance to catch up with stories that matter to them. But will Moments do for Twitter, and advertising in Twitter, a good thing or a bad thing? So Twitter Moments – Justin, what are your thoughts on this one?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: My thinking is that I enjoy Twitter, and I really like it as a platform. But it seems to have stalled to me over the last twelve months or so, and I think looking at the growth in Twitter numbers, that seems to have stalled as well as the technology. And so I can see that with Twitter Moments, which I hadn’t seen before this week, so it was a good opportunity to go and have a look. For anyone else who hasn’t seen them, it’s really much more image based, with a story underneath. So if you’ve got the Super Bowl, or a big sporting event, you might have a Twitter Moment for that, and share lots of images, and Twitter commentary.

I don’t think that that’s going to be enough to change Twitter’s direction. You know, I don’t think we’re radically changing the Twitter platform with that, and it’s not going to start increasing subscriber numbers again would be my theory. Which is a shame, but it seems to me that Twitter Moments are really about creating content, which is just what everyone else is doing. So where’s the competitive advantage to Twitter in offering that content? You know, I can create a Twitter Moment just as easily as Twitter can create it, and then it’s about the quality of the journalist, or the content producers that you’ve got creating that content. And I don’t think that’s much of a competitive advantage.

DAVID BAIN: We’ve got Stephanie saying that bringing non-Twitters a comfort level to try Twitter seems like a tag board across with traditional media. Danny, have you checked this out at all?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah. I mean, I agree with Justin. I’ve been on Twitter for a number of years now, and I mean I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but even the advertising, it just seems really, really annoying. I know people who don’t want to even use the main channel because of that. And I think it’s a problem that they have that they’re not really sure what to do with it, and where to make the money. Moments, and going down the image route, and creating stories from stuff, I think it’s one of them where let’s have a chat in twelve months. I don’t think it will do anything. But that’s just me. But I don’t know.

DAVID BAIN: Yeah, apparently advertisers have already agreed to do this. So they’re going to launch advert free, but certainly the intention is within a few weeks to actually rollout the advertising related to this. So it’ll certainly have to be a great user experience to get people to use it. Andrew, are you a regular Tweeter? Do you love the platform?

ANDREW STEEL: I use Twitter. I wouldn’t say I’m a power user by any means, but I do find it useful for keeping track of certainly news topics on things that I’m interested in. I think the interesting thing about Twitter Moments to me, I guess from a couple of points, was it seems to me, you know, for new users coming onto Twitter, there’s at least something to start engaging with before you can build a following. Because my understanding of it is that you’ll be able to see Moments, and they’ll feed a lot of these through as standard into people’s feeds.

From a personal level in using Twitter I think it’s kind of interesting because there’s nothing more frustrating sometimes than when you see something in your feed on Twitter, and it’s clearly relating to a bigger story, but it doesn’t tell you the full picture. So if Moments allow you to be able to jump in, and kind of cycle back to the start of that, and kind of follow the story through in a timeline fashion, then that’s great, and I’m all for that.

I think though, as the guys rightly point out, how advertising becomes involved in it, and again, you know, it feels like it’s been a bit of a theme of the points we’ve talked about here. But again, it can’t be that kind of race to the bottom. It has to be done in a very subtle way, I think, to make it genuinely useful to people so that it doesn’t just come across as just spam again in your Twitter feed. Because, you know, exactly as Danny said, a lot of the kind of promoted Tweet type adverts that you see at the moment, or certainly that I see in my feed anyway, seem quite often to be either unrelated, or of no interest to me at all. It’s just something that’s taking up space. So I think people looking to use it will have to be mindful of that.

Again though, you know as we said before in the other topics we talked around this, I do believe that there will be some people who use it really smart, in really creative ways, and it will be something that will get a lot of engagement. You know, it’s just the thought and effort that goes into it, and kind of planning this activity, much like anything else really, that will make it a success or otherwise. But I’m totally with Danny on let’s see how it goes in six, twelve months’ time, and how it’s working, and whether it’s just going to be a bit of a flash in the pan kind of fad introduction or not. But certainly Twitter have been introducing things that have kind of been useful in that way of being able to bring topics to light, and including things like while you were away, and picking out people that you follow or have interacted a lot with, and what they’ve been tweeting as well. So it’ll be interesting if nothing else.

DAVID BAIN: We’ve got Andy making sure we all have the same level of props there. Danny, you don’t think that it’s an outstanding content marketing opportunity now to actually jump on over the next couple of months? You’re confident that you need to just sit there, and wait, and see what happens, yeah?

DANNY ASHTON: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we’ve tried advertising on Twitter in regards to just purely content, and yeah, it’s a good way to spend a lot of money pretty quick. And I think that’s the problem with it. People are obviously working well, but it is very much lead generation with the whole kit caboodle that comes with that. But I think from a content perspective, paid amplifications, things like StumbleUpon or Outbrain are perfect because you can have some targeting, they work with publishers, and it’s in the content feed. But when it comes down to it, it all comes down to influence, and finding the people who influence.

And at this moment in time, I think that there’s always going to be a place for kind of B2C, big budget stuff. And there’s people with lots of budget that just want to play with stuff on Twitter. But I think for small agencies like ourselves, I think we’ll certainly wait this one out until we see how it works really.

DAVID BAIN: Justin, might you be tempted to give Twitter Moments a test, in terms of actually advertising if that opportunity does come along fairly soon, or are you one of the sit on the bench for a while, and we’ll see what happens?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: You know, I was smiling because Danny and I are both from Manchester. I’m assuming that’s your accent, Danny.

DANNY ASHTON: Yes, yes it is.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: And no I’ve only said, oh no, we won’t spend money on that. That was my feeling as well.

DAVID BAIN: And a couple of Scots here as well.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: I don’t see any value in it for most clients, and I agree, it’s a real kind of—if you’ve got Pepsi’s or Coke’s marketing budget, then of course you might want to be on Twitter. But for most of the clients that I’m working with that are kind of medium sized business, who are looking for value in their advertising, then I just don’t see it in that platform at the moment. So no, it’s probably not something I would try to get at any scale, anyway, in the near future. But that’s the way they’re building at the moment anyway, because the material’s collated by humans, then they’re investing quite a lot in putting those together. I mean, we’ll be around specific big events for those big advertisers, and that’s what they’re targeting.

DAVID BAIN: We’ve got Stephanie saying, ‘Have we talked Twitter Buy It Now buttons for midrange retailers?’ Justin, is that something that you’ve tested at all? Have you got any clients that are doing well with other forms of Twitter advertising spend?

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: I haven’t tested the Buy It Now buttons, so it’s difficult for me to comment. But other than to say that we have run Twitter campaigns, and as Danny said, it’s a very easy way of spending money very quickly.

DAVID BAIN: Okay, well Stephanie, I don’t think we’ve got anyone on the call today actually having tested that one there, unless Andrew can tell me anything different.

ANDREW STEEL: No, again it wouldn’t be something that I manage myself. But my understanding was with those that it’s a US thing only at the moment. I don’t know if that’s changed, it’s rolled out to the UK, but it’s not something I’ve got any personal experience of operating in. To be honest I’ve not even really seen much in the wild in my usage of Twitter either. Sorry.

DAVID BAIN: No, that’s fine. It’s interesting that things are often rolled out in the US first of all, and then they come to the UK. And that can be the case with SEO as well, which can give the UK a little bit of option to see what’s happened, and prepare for what’s going to happen before it actually happens to them as well. So I suppose it’s got its positives as well as its drawbacks, things sometimes happening in the US first of all.

But I reckon that just about takes us to the end of this week’s show. So just about time for a single takeaway from each of our guests, and some sharing of where to find out more details. So starting off with Justin.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Excellent. So I thought the one thing that was particularly useful after the trials I’ve had over the last few months that was talking about WordPress security. And I made a note of Sucuri was the recommendation there.

DAVID BAIN: Good, good. I’m glad you’re gathering tips as well as giving them, so that’s a good thing.

DANNY ASHTON: Yes, I agree. I was really interested in kind of Google’s new technology for looking at content, and looking at maybe either trialling that for ourselves, or developing something that’s similar. But Google don’t know, because that’s always a good benefit. But yeah, great fun.

JUSTIN DEAVILLE: Sorry, no. It’s receptional.com is the agency website, and you can get me @JustinDeaville on Twitter.

DAVID BAIN: Thank you. And Andrew, your final thoughts and contact details.

ANDREW STEEL: Yeah, I think much like Danny had said there, I think the mobile technology, and the kind of improvements that Google are looking to make in terms of the speed with which content served specifically for mobile through the kind of MP pages stuff is going to be really interesting. Again, it’s something that we’ll be looking at as well because I think page speed and mobile in general are going to be increasing focus areas for digital marketing. Not that they’re not already this year, but I can only see that continuing to be the case as we move forward as well. Because we have reached that point now that we’ve long talked about of more people are accessing and using organic search through mobile devices than through desktops. So it’s definitely going to be a focus area for myself, and my team as well.

DAVID BAIN: Great stuff, thanks Andrew. I’m David Bain, head of growth at Analytics SEO, the agency and enterprise SEO platform with big insights. So sign up for a free demo of our platform, that’s www.authoritas.com. And you can also find me interviewing online marketing gurus over at www.digitalmarketingradio.com. Now, if you’re watching this show as a recording, remember to watch the next show live. So head over to thisweekinorganic.com, and that link should automatically redirect to the next live show we do on Blab. And for those of you watching live, you can also catch up on previous episodes. We do an audio podcast on iTunes, so go directly to that at www.thisweekinorganic.com/itunes. But until we see you again, have a nice weekend, and thank you all for joining us. So adios, and thanks all for taking part. Thanks again.

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Becoming an Authority in your field and reaching the dizzy heights of #1 in your industry is still as achievable as ever. You just need a multi-disciplinary team of people to help you formulate and execute a successful plan.